Not quite the Lord of the (wedding) Rings

I'm starting to feel like I haven't revised for the final exam, writes Dan Wainwright.

You know that sudden jolt you'd get in the pit of your stomach as a child when, just on the point of drifting off to sleep, you'd remember you hadn't done your homework.

That's how I feel about my upcoming wedding.

It's not until next summer so you might be wondering why I'm making such a fuss, although you're probably still puzzling over how someone like me managed to even find a woman prepared to sign a binding agreement to spend our lives together.

But that's the sort of strange little boy I was. I had that sickening feeling whenever I had been given homework and had not done it the very same night it was set, even if it wasn't due in for a week.

It's why I didn't have that many friends at school and I used to spend PE lessons running away from the football.

My fiancée has her part of things – which is pretty much everything - very much under control. As far as I can tell, all I have to do is pick a best man (my brother) to sort out the stag do, choose some outfits for us to wear, book the honeymoon and choose my wedding ring.

Apart from the first one I haven't managed a single thing on my list.

This weekend we scoured the jewellery shops looking for the pieces of metal that are meant to symbolise our bond.

I spent a rather embarrassing few minutes with a lady in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter scrutinising my fingers and marvelling at what slender hands I had.

"You've never done any manual work, have you?" she said, as suddenly my ego shrank to that of the man in the Mr Muscle advert.

At first I wondered if she was going to bring some butch fellow from out the back to offer to my fiancée as some sort of man upgrade.

But instead she continued: "Your problem is your knuckles are flat so the ring needs to be smaller, otherwise it won't stay on.

"If you'd done something with your hands it'd be all right."

Suitably put in my place as a bit of a namby pamby I'm now looking for one that is nice and light weight, in order to avoid further humiliation. Although thinking about it it's only likely to come under so much scrutiny in future if I have my palm read by a clair voyant who is married to a builder.

It's times like this I wish the ring Bilbo Baggins had was real. That way I could just turn invisible and leave all this to my other half.